The Politics and Policy of U.S. Immigration
It's not just about border security.
On Tuesday night, Democrats flipped George Santos’ seat from red to blue in a special election for New York’s 3rd Congressional District. Tom Suozzi defeated Republican Mazi Melesa Pilip by roughly eight points to win back his former seat. As I was reading Politico’s Emily Ngo and Jeff Coltin write up of Suozzi’s victory, however, this paragraph caught me short:
Suozzi’s apparent defeat of Pilip came after the Democrats spent big on the airwaves, his campaign outraising hers by millions. Suozzi may have had the benefit of a bigger campaign war chest and name recognition after 30 years serving the area in elected office, but Pilip and the Republicans had the advantage of staking out a hardline position on border security.
Here’s my very simple question: is a hardline position on border security actually an advantage?
The polling shows that voters are worried about immigration, which is seen as hurting Biden and helping Trump. That is certainly how AEI’s Ruy Teixeira presented it last month:
In the latest Wall Street Journal poll, Trump is preferred over Biden by 30 points, his greatest lead on any issue. In the latest Fox News poll, voters favor a wide variety of measures to crack down on illegal immigration: increasing border agents (79 percent); deporting illegal immigrants (67 percent); penalizing hiring illegal immigrants (64 percent); using the US military at the border (58 percent); and even building a border wall (54 percent).
Illuminating detail comes from a December survey conducted by the Blueprint group. Between Trump and Biden, who are voters most likely to think is close to their views on immigration? It’s Trump by a country mile: 44 percent of voters say Trump is close to their position, compared to a mere 25 percent who say Biden is close to their position….
Across all voters, 56 percent say Biden is more liberal than they are on the immigration issue. Given a binary choice, voters prefer an approach that would “increase border enforcement and make asylum and refugee policies stricter” (61 percent) to one that would “increase legal pathways to immigrate to the United States” (39 percent). And they are far more likely to say rules on refugee and asylum status should be made stricter (53 percent) rather than looser (14 percent), and to believe that the US should take in fewer (52 percent) rather than more (17 percent) refugees and asylum seekers.
What part of “We need to get a lot tougher on border security” don’t Democrats understand?
When the Associated Press is running stories with headlines like, “Biden is left with few choices as immigration takes center stage in American politics,” and when ABC News/Ipsos runs polling showing that voters blame Biden more than Trump for last week’s failure of the border deal, that does seem pretty bad. As TNR’s Greg Sargent notes:
That same Ipsos poll finds Americans trust Trump over Biden to handle immigration by 44 percent to 26 percent: Here Biden gets blame for what’s happening at the border and also for the failure of Congress to improve the situation after Trump commanded Republicans not to….
The border deal’s demise shows yet again that for a former president, Trump wields unprecedented influence over his party. Yet how aware are swing voters of this level of influence?
Democrats must do more to communicate that Republicans are sabotaging the country because Trump told them to. Democrats spent a few days pointing out that Republicans themselves admitted they iced the deal to help Trump politically. But they mustn’t let this drop. Keep saying it. What if Biden did more in coming days to highlight the fact that the Border Patrol—which endorsed Trump—supported the deal that Trump killed?
That was certainly Suozzi’s strategy in the special election — he supported the bipartisan border deal while Pilip opposed it. Axios’ Andrew Solander and Stef Kight points out that this appears to be the blueprint for Democrats for the rest of 2024:
Even Republicans acknowledge that Democrat Tom Suozzi's embrace of stricter border policy — and his attacks on Republicans for rejecting the Senate's bipartisan border bill — contributed to his eight-point victory.
"He sounded like a Republican talking about the border," House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said at a press conference Wednesday, in which he urged the GOP not to "panic" about its chances of losing the House in November….
President Biden has vowed to remind voters "every day between now and November" that former President Trump and his GOP allies blew up the bipartisan border deal.
Democrats believe Suozzi's victory provided early vindication of that message….
"The GOP has presented Democrats with a unique, unprecedented opening to go on the offensive on border security," Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Democrats' lead border negotiator, argued in a memo Wednesday morning.
This is all great, and yet I would suggest that the centrist messaging of “border security” is insufficient for Democrats, for two reasons. The first is that it is worth talking about the positives of immigration for political reasons. In the latest NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist poll, it remains the case that when asked whether openness to immigration was essential to American identity, a majority of Americans (57%) said yes. It is Republicans who are the outlier on this issue, according to NPR:
Preserving democracy tops the list of issues for voters in this election year, but not for Republicans, who are most concerned with immigration, a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll finds.
For Democrats, they said preserving democracy is top of mind for them when thinking about voting in this November's election, followed by inflation. For independents, it was preserving democracy, followed by immigration and inflation. After immigration for Republicans, it was inflation, and nothing else came close.
The results explain the evident divide when it comes to what the candidates are campaigning on.
Former President Donald Trump routinely talks about the threat from immigration, often in nativist and xenophobic ways. Immigration was fundamental to his initial political rise in 2015, and there's a clear split in the survey on Americans' mentality toward it. A majority said the country's openness to people from all over the world is essential to what it means to be American. But nearly three-quarters of Republicans said being too open risks America's identity.
Perhaps the best message that Democrats could put forward is the massive economic benefits that immigration has bestowed upon the U.S. economy in recent years. The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell has been banging away on this theme in her columns. Her last column on this topic made the point especially well:
Voters and political strategists have treated our country’s ability to draw immigrants from around the world as a curse; it could be a blessing, if only we could get out of our own way.
Consider a few numbers: Last week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released updated 10-year economic and budget forecasts. The numbers look significantly better than they did a year earlier, and immigration is a key reason.
The CBO has now factored in a previously unexpected surge in immigration that began in 2022, which the agency assumes will persist for several years. These immigrants are more likely to work than their native-born counterparts, largely because immigrants skew younger. This infusion of working-age immigrants will more than offset the expected retirement of the aging, native-born population.
This will in turn lead to better economic growth. As CBO Director Phill Swagel wrote in a note accompanying the forecasts: As a result of these immigration-driven revisions to the size of the labor force, “we estimate that, from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenues will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise.”
Read Rampell’s entire column to see the ways in which Republicans have turned their back on a $7 trillion boost to U.S. GDP — a boost that other countries with worse demographics wish they could replicate.
Axios’ Solender and Kight quote Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal offering the following framing on immigration: “The correct message, she argued, is not to ‘say “I'm going to shut down the border on day one,” it is: “Immigrants are a critical part of our fabric, Americans want an orderly process with security at the border, and, by the way, Republicans have voted against this every single time.”'"
I’m surprised to say that this sounds exactly right to me. Democrats should articulate a message on immigration that reminds Americans — who want to be reminded, by the way — that border security is important, but so is ensuring a large, healthy inflow of immigrants.
Of course the core MAGA voter won't be moved by anything that comes from the Biden campaign. But a positive message is always more effective than a defensive one. Yes, highlight the importance of "security" and Trump's order to Republicans in Congress to kill any immigration legislation. But put the role of immigration in maintaining a strong economy front and center, and also remind voters that immigration is what makes us "American" -- almost all of us ultimately are immigrants.
I grew up in a small town in NW Ohio that's been a casualty of rustbelt economic decline for the past 50 years. And even though I'm a quite liberal progressive Democrat, to me your proposed messaging sounds tone-deaf and mis-targeted. The places that appear to matter most to election success right now are the rust belt areas like where I grew up, and they seem relatively up-for-grabs between Democrats and Republicans, but increasingly lean Republican. Talking about economic success in these areas is ridiculous and a non-starter. Ditto the benefits of immigration. These areas haven't had anyone moving to them in great areas for generations. In Ohio the only place that's growing is Columbus -- which is a world away for much of Ohio. I assume it's similar in Michigan, upstate NY, western PA, and Indiana.
In the small, declining towns that have lost their purpose and their engines of broad-based economic opportunity, I don't think there's any message of hope one can give without a radically different approach by business and industry. So talking about economic benefits of anything to such a crowd just seems silly. Two generations of decline and all you're really left with as working emotions are anger and resentment, and any electoral messaging needs to figure out how to work with that.